Graphics matter more than ever in business communication and innovative companies are leveraging balanced PC platform technology to generate and view rich visual presentations, including videos and 3D graphics to communicate winning ideas.Read the rest of this entry »

AMD announced the availability of robust new virtualization solutions powered by a combination of technologies from AMD and Microsoft Corp. This new deployment model uses AMD Opteron processors with AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology together with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to deliver significant efficiencies to enterprises large and small. Mid-market companies in particular, which have traditionally been slower to implement virtualization, can take advantage of the combined AMD and Microsoft product offering to help reduce cost, complexity and energy consumption.

“AMD has taken a leading role in driving virtualization innovation into the x86 processor, helping to meet a compelling need in the commercial market for cost reduction, increased performance and energy efficiency,” said Kevin Knox, vice president of Worldwide Commercial Business, AMD. “Now, through our continued partnership with Microsoft, AMD is expanding virtualization’s reach and the benefits of resource consolidation to companies that might not have taken advantage of virtualization in the past.”

Resource consolidation achieved through virtualization can deliver the low energy consumption, and superior utilization and manageability demanded by today’s business es. AMD Opteron processors and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, a hypervisor-based virtualization feature of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, allow OEMs, VARs and Solution Providers to offer a valuable server virtualization combination to help increase their competitive edge and market opportunity. AMD-V technology and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also help enable business es to scale according to demands, boosting the efficiency of workloads.

“AMD and Microsoft have a history of working closely together to design industry-leading solutions that allow customers to maximize their investments and stay ahead of the changing business landscape,” said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Microsoft Infrastructure Server Marketing. “Virtualization is here to stay, and Microsoft’s portfolio of virtualization software combined with technology like AMD-V will help a business of any size realize its potential.”

Increased Flexibility for the Mid-Market
Mid-market companies are often faced with legacy applications and hardware, integration challenges and cost constraints. The efficiencies and flexibility promised through the combined AMD and Microsoft product offering is expected to particularly benefit this underserved market segment.

“We implemented virtualization for manageability purposes, but rapidly adopted the AMD and Microsoft solution for its multiple benefits,” said David P. Smith, Chief Technology Officer, ServiceU Corporation, an on-demand event management software provider. “Through the use of power-efficient AMD processors running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, in one datacenter alone we doubled the number of operating system installs and processor cores, while cutting power requirements, heat output and space requirements by approximately one third,” continued Smith. “We were blown away by the results, and are now firm believers in the AMD Opteron processor and Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology.”

AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture are well suited for x86 server-based virtualization. Microsoft and AMD’s robust architectures allow customers to scale with ease, providing a flexible infrastructure that can evolve as an organization grows. The two platforms also deliver the necessary performance to securely handle memory-intensive virtualization with less overhead—all with low energy consumption. Benefits of AMD’s design architecture and technology include:
– AMD-V technology improves efficiency by allowing customers to host more virtual machines, transactions and users per server with superior control and less overhead.
– Native multi-core capabilities fully integrate processing cores rather than simply packing them together.
– AMD continues to add significant features to AMD Opteron processors, such as Extended Migration, the Tagged Translation Look-aside Buffer for fast switching times and Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology.

AMD announced that its board of directors elected President and COO Dirk Meyer as the company’s chief executive officer. Meyer succeeds Hector Ruiz, who will become executive chairman of AMD and chair of the board of directors. As executive chairman, Ruiz will ensure a smooth executive leadership transition, focus on driving the company’s asset smart strategy to completion, and assist with high-level government and strategic partner relations.

“Dirk’s election to CEO is the final phase of a two-year succession plan developed and implemented jointly by AMD’s board of directors and executive team,” said Robert Palmer, lead independent director. “Under Hector’s strong leadership, AMD drove the industry adoption of pervasive 64-bit and multicore computing, became a trusted enterprise-class partner to leading technology suppliers and significantly expanded its global footprint in high-growth markets like China.
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“Dirk’s extensive experience as a business leader and his notable engineering accomplishments before and during his 12 years at AMD make him ideally suited to build upon the foundation Hector created and lead AMD.”

“AMD has fundamentally altered the industry landscape, leading the innovation agenda while delivering greater choice and better experiences for our customers and users,” said Ruiz, executive chairman, AMD. “Dirk is a gifted leader who possesses the right skills and experience to continue driving AMD and the industry forward in new, compelling directions. I am placing the company in excellent hands.”

Meyer, 46, joined AMD in 1995 and made his mark as part of the design team responsible for the original AMD Athlon™ processor, a breakthrough product for AMD and the industry’s first processor to break the 1GHz barrier. From 2001 to 2006, Meyer led the company’s microprocessor business, overseeing related R&D, manufacturing, operations, and marketing. His leadership skills during these five years resulted in a doubling of revenue for the microprocessor business and a substantial expansion of AMD’s global profile. In 2006, Meyer was appointed president and COO, and in 2007, he was elected to AMD’s board of directors.

“I’m tremendously excited by the opportunities ahead for AMD. As the only company that possesses expertise and leadership in both x86 microprocessor and graphics technology, AMD has a unique capability to drive the next wave of innovation through the integration of computing and graphics processors to deliver a better computing experience,” said Meyer, president and chief executive officer, AMD. “We are in the midst of re-shaping AMD’s business model with the goal of delivering sustained profitability through a focus on the core technologies that differentiate AMD. My immediate priority is to work with the leadership team to accelerate this transformation. I appreciate the trust that the Board and Hector have placed in me. During the years that I’ve worked under Hector, he has been an excellent leader, mentor and friend.”

Ruiz, 62, joined AMD as president and chief operating officer in January 2000 and became AMD’s chief executive officer on April 25, 2002. He has served on AMD’s board of directors since 2000 and was appointed chairman of the board of directors in 2004. His accomplishments at AMD and contributions to the industry include:

– Expanding AMD beyond the consumer desktop market into the commercial and enterprise market, resulting in AMD technology being used by as much as 90 of the top 100 companies on the Forbes Global 2000 by the year 2007.

– Growing AMD’s customer base to include the world’s top 10 computer manufacturers and the world’s top 10 consumer electronics manufacturers.

– Redefining the future of enterprise computing with the introduction of the AMD Opteron™ processor, paving the way for the industry-standard x86 architecture to deliver the advantages of 64-bit computing.

– Sharply growing AMD’s global presence, with new teams and new design centers in China, India, and other high-growth markets. In 2007, AMD’s international sales represented 87 percent of total consolidated revenue, as compared to 66 percent in 2001.

– Focusing the industry on innovating to better meet customer needs. This strategy, commonly referred to as “customer-centric innovation,” has become a hallmark of Hector and of AMD, and is a primary point of AMD’s competitive differentiation.

– Broadening AMD’s platform advantage to include leading-edge graphics and paving the road for the next generation of computing, Accelerated Computing, with the ATI acquisition in late 2006.

– Promoting fair and open competition in the global microprocessor market with AMD filing a landmark antitrust suit against Intel. Since 2005, antitrust regulators around the world have validated claims made by AMD regarding Intel’s illegal business practices by launching independent investigations that have thus far uncovered evidence of illegal monopoly maintenance that harms consumer choice.

AMD introduced four new Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ SE processors to help IT managers take a new approach to “scaling up” their datacenter in order to address demanding enterprise-computing environments. Rather than invest in traditionally large and expensive enterprise-class proprietary hardware, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors empower businesses to affordably and easily scale up a datacenter by moving to servers that can offer enterprise-class functionality at industry-standard pricing. Adding more cores to 4-socket and 8-socket x86 servers can allow users to gain greater levels of performance and efficiency which is necessary to handle database and virtualization applications. The new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors will be available in systems from global OEMs and solution providers including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM.

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“For many customers, the concept of ‘scaling up’ a datacenter has meant a sizeable financial investment in new hardware to gain satisfactory performance during peak workloads,” said Patrick Patla, director, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. “Today, the performance benefits of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processor built on AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport™ technology can help IT managers improve application performance and scalability of memory and data intensive workloads at a fraction of the cost. This is a significant benefit for customers looking to consolidate their datacenter or those interested in moving from proprietary hardware to x86 servers for mission critical software, such as database applications.”

As the industry continues to rally around “scaling up” datacenters, Microsoft is at the forefront of this discussion to help ensure that mid-market and enterprise customers seeking to improve server utilization can take full advantage of 64-bit environments, such as the x86-based SMP servers based on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, for complex databases including those in consolidation and virtualization environments.

“A flexible and scalable datacenter that meets the dynamic demands of doing business in a global economy is more important than ever for organizations of all sizes,” said Dan Neault, general manager, SQL Server at Microsoft Corp. “As we prepare for the general availability of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, we are excited about our work with AMD to provide our mutual customers a state of the art data platform for their business critical workloads such as ERP, Web, Business Intelligence, and Data Warehousing.”

AMD announced wider adoption and significant enhancements for the AMD Virtual Experience ( http://ave.amd.com). This content-rich virtual tradeshow provides visitors a unique visual experience with even broader access to supplier and vendor buying decision information, as well as the latest on controlling energy consumption in the datacenter.

Major technology industry leaders are embracing the interactive, online environment to raise visibility of their solutions based on AMD Opteron™ processors, including the newly introduced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Booths are now funded primarily by the participating technology partners, representing a change in business model since the site was introduced in September 2006.

“AMD has an unwavering focus on fostering connections to solve IT datacenter challenges, and, as such, our role as the catalyst for bringing together industry leaders has resulted in a cost-effective, yet undeniably personal alternative to the traditional tradeshow,” said Bob Brewer, corporate vice president, Marketing and Strategy, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. “As an interactive 3D environment, the AMD Virtual Experience is a natural extension of AMD technology, which enables the ultimate visual experience.”

Today’s latest enhancements include an expansion of user navigational control and features, such as a one-on-one chat application, increased video and collateral search capabilities, and virtual vendor shops. Registrants continue to be empowered to steer their own course, choose information of interest, participate in demos, download white papers and observe the keynotes at any time they wish – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – all from the comfort of their PC. Additional content, as well as new booths from technology partners, will continue to be rolled out over the next six months.

“Providing rich information to our customers, wherever and whenever they want it is a cornerstone in Dell’s commitment to help customers simplify the way they buy, deploy and manage their IT,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Product Group. “Quite simply, our close collaboration with AMD is helping us increase our virtual presence and impact on the market.”

The already heavily populated interface has received more than one million unique visitors and has delivered more than 600,000 downloaded pieces of collateral since its introduction last year. By increasing the number of leading technology partners and incorporating text and video content search capabilities, the visitors’ virtual experience is even better, helping them to quickly access information tailored to their specific needs and interests. Technology partners participating in the site for the first time are Appro, Cray, Dell, Egenera, Lenovo, Rackable Systems, Verari Systems and VMware.

“The Lenovo ThinkCentre A61e ultra small form factor desktop with choices of the energy-efficient, 45-watt AMD Athlon™ X2 dual-core processor and single-core AMD Sempron™ processor demonstrates our joint collaboration in providing an extensive menu of environmentally responsible, energy-efficient technology choices,” said Tom Tobul, executive director, Emerging Products Marketing, Lenovo. “And working with AMD to provide timely and useful information in one place to aid a visitor’s buying decision is exactly where we want to be to showcase our innovative ThinkCentre A61e desktop solutions.”

AMD reported third quarter 2007 revenue of $1.632 billion or an 18% increase compared to the second quarter of 2007 and a 23% raise compared to the third quarter of 2006 [1]. The third quarter also indicates AMD’s operating loss of $226 million, and a net loss of $396 million, or $0.71 per share. Third quarter bears a negative impact of $120 million, or $0.22 per share, due to ATI acquisition-related, integration and severance charges and impairment of assets.

“We are encouraged by the progress we made in our third quarter financial results. We delivered a strong revenue increase, gained 8 percentage points of gross margin and reduced our operating loss by more than half,” said Robert J. Rivet, AMD’s Chief Financial Officer. “We sold a record number of microprocessors through our distribution channel and began revenue shipments of Quad-core AMD Opteron™ processors in the quarter.

Third quarter charges of $120 million consisted of ATI acquisition-related, integration and severance charges of $78 million and asset impairments of $42 million associated with our ownership of Spansion, Inc. common stock.

Third quarter 2007 gross margin was 41 percent, compared to 33 percent in the second quarter of 2007 and 51 percent in the third quarter of 2006. The increase from the prior quarter was due to increased microprocessor unit shipments, manufacturing efficiencies, improved inventory management, and a richer product mix in the Computing Solutions and Graphics segments.

Graphics
Graphics segment revenue of $252 million grew 29 percent from the second quarter of 2007. The success of the new ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors led to increased unit shipments and revenue.

Consumer Electronics
Third quarter Consumer Electronics segment revenue was $97 million, compared with $85 million in the second quarter of 2007 driven by improved handheld unit sales and increased game console royalties.